The Haunts & Horrors MEGAPACK®. Lawrence Watt-Evans
it was just too much for her to keep up alone, so she was moving to a retirement community. Wendy didn’t say anything about her husband having died recently too. That wasn’t the level she liked to relate to people on. It clarified for her the difference between generations, though: obviously this older woman had depended on her husband to take care of all kinds of things she didn’t want to handle herself, whereas Wendy had tuned the car, Wendy had kept the checkbook, Malcolm had done the cooking—while he was alive. They were still trying to work out rules of matter manipulation to see if he could handle cooking now, but so far their experiments hadn’t uncovered laws that would let him. He could move some things, but the ability came and went.
If she had lost Malcolm completely, would she have had the strength to go out and buy a house, start a new phase in life? She wasn’t sure. Some small part of her told her she might have locked herself up in the apartment with all the curtains closed, living on cheese and crackers and letting her awareness decay.
It wasn’t a side of herself she wanted to recognize. Good that it hadn’t come to that.
When she met the owner, Wendy liked her immediately. It seemed a shame to buy the house and take it away from her. It would be a mess if Wendy had to ask for a lot of repairs before she closed on the place.
She had finished her tacos and Chico-fries (Tater Tots by any other name) and was feeling much more even-tempered (Malcolm had told her she got really jittery if she went too long without eating; since he didn’t have a job anymore, he spent all his time observing her, and often told her things she wasn’t interested in hearing, especially when they were true. It was an aspect of their new relationship she was just getting accustomed to) when a head and some shoulders stuck out through the wall of what she was already thinking of as Her House. The hair on the head was gray, not glossy black like Malcolm’s. The face turned toward her, peering through the twilight. She covered her mouth with a paper napkin. Her throat was too tight for her to swallow the mouthful in her mouth.
She was seeing a Ghost.
He slipped out of the house and walked to the edge of the front lawn, staring at her with fierce eyes. She shrank back in her seat. She tried to swallow. Instead she coughed chewed Chico-fries into her napkin. The ghost shook his fist at her and yelled something, but she couldn’t understand him.
“Malcolm,” she squeaked, just the way she had almost twenty years earlier when they went to one of the early showings of The Exorcist and Linda Blair’s head had turned all the way around. Back then, she had been able to bury her face in his shoulder, and feel his arm around her, even though she thought he was a—what was the word for nerd in those days? Square? She couldn’t remember. It wasn’t until ten years later that she had realized what a terrific human being he was and they had gotten married. But that friendly shoulder had helped plant the suspicion in her mind that he couldn’t be all bad.
Malcolm materialized beside her. “Drive,” he said.
She turned the key without depressing the clutch. What a racket! She couldn’t seem to remember which foot did what, and her hands were shaking so badly she could hardly grip the steering wheel, but she managed to start the car and pull a wobbly U-turn. They rocketed up the street away from the house.
“What happened?” she asked in a low voice when they were parked outside their hotel room.
“I went…Wendy…I—” He shook himself and said, “Buhuhuhuh.” Then: “I went into the crawl space under the house, and there isn’t any water there. I looked at the foundation. No cracks. It didn’t figure to me that the lady would keep the yard in such great shape and let the house fall apart. I went through the wood and I didn’t see a single termite. I checked the insulation in the roof, and it’s not even asbestos, it’s foam. The inspector was wrong about all those things, Wendy. The house is perfect.
“So I figured, no problem. We’ll move in. I wanted to find a good place for storing the locket. I walked into the family room, and old lady was sitting there reading a play, and he was looking over her shoulder and muttering. ‘Anna,’ he said, ‘you can’t do this to me. We swore we’d end our days in this house. I built it for you.’ She just turned a page without paying any attention. ‘Anna!’ he yelled. Then he looked up and saw me. ‘Get out, you damned home wrecker!’ he screamed. His eyes started glowing red and he got bigger and, and, I don’t know, I felt like I had a heart again and it was going to burst.” He was quiet for a minute. “I was ready to run a sixty yard dash in five seconds, but I didn’t know which way to jump.
“Then he went raging out of the house and I had time to get calm again. I thought, how awful for him that she doesn’t even know he’s there.”
She looked at him and he looked at her. She leaned closer. After dark, he got solid enough to hold her. He slipped his arm around her, easing closer than he would have been able to when he was alive; he could go through the seat back and still hold her tightly. It was something they had been practicing. “Then,” murmured Malcolm, “I heard you squeak.”
* * * *
The realtor didn’t want Wendy speaking with the owner directly. It was the part of the negotiation that bugged Wendy the most, yet she understood that realtors didn’t want a buyer and a seller to work out their own deal and cut the realtors out of their percentage. After all, the realtor had taken Wendy to fifteen other houses. She was working for her money.
Summer twilight was finally seeping into night. Wendy clutched Malcolm’s locket in her hand and rang the doorbell.
The old man’s face, features twisted into a gargoyle’s grimace of anger, thrust out through the door. Wendy stepped back and fell off the edge of the stoop, but Malcolm steadied her from behind, his hands on her shoulders.
The door opened, pulling back through the old man, and Anna Jericho, the owner, peered out through the screen door. “Hello?” she said.
“Uh, hi,” said Wendy, straightening and tugging the front of her dress down—her half-fall had hiked it up.
“May I help you?” Anna said.
“Well, uh—I’m the buyer, Mrs. Jericho. We met this morning.
“I know that, dear.”
“And I just wanted to—to—” Wendy glanced over her shoulder. The neighbors weren’t all staring out their windows, but some were watching. “May I come in?”
“All right.” Anna unlatched the screen door and held it open.
Her husband stood in the doorway, his hands up in fists before him. “You may NOT come in! No, keep your distance, you evil young woman!”
Wendy took a deep breath and walked through him.
Other than a faint fizzing on her skin, the experience left her none the worse. She thought she might even be making up the fizzing because she had expected to feel something. She glanced behind her, and found the old man staring at her in horror, clutching his chest and breathing loudly with his mouth open. Psychological, no doubt, since his heart and lungs weren’t sustaining him any longer. She offered him a smile, but that just made him madder.
“Come into the family room, dear,” Anna said.
They settled on the red sofa which sat on the red plaid rug. “My husband was partial to red,” said Anna.
“I want to talk to you about him,” Wendy said. “Are you sure you want to sell the house?”
“Yes. It’s just too much for me to keep up. The garden takes a lot of looking after…well, I have a good yardman for that, but he doesn’t weed. And there’s so much space without Arturo to fill it, and so many things to keep clean, and I don’t even want to own them anymore. I’m sure Arturo would want me to take care of myself.”
“Well, I’m not,” Wendy said. “He doesn’t want you to sell the house. He says he built this house for you and you swore you’d end your days here.”
Anna paled. “What do you mean, ‘he says’?”
“His